Last week we revealed the winners to our first ever Show Us Your PC contest. Our top 3 picks won Amazon gift cards and the honorable mentions got some sweet, sweet Steam games. And we got to ogle some awesome custom PCs, which happens to be our favorite thing to do.

Did you miss it? Do you want to relive the excitement in a more digestible format? This contest recap is for you!

And finally, the grand winner of our Show Us Your PC contest. (If you’re catching up, yesterday we revealed our Second Place winner, Wednesday featured our Third Place winner, and on Tuesday we showed off our two Honorable Mentions.)

Ladyfolk and mentlegen, our first place winner: A FANtastic Build

Skye recently built this beauty after 6 years with an Intel Core 2 Duo running Windows XP. We’d say it’s a heck of a successor!

We’d like to introduce the second of three winners in Logical Increments’ Show Us Your PC Contest! (If you’re catching up, yesterday we revealed our Third Place winner, and on Tuesday we showed off our two Honorable Mentions.)

Intel’s latest enthusiast platform, the Haswell-E CPU family, has just been launched. There are three CPUs available: two 6-cores and one 8-core. We will not be getting into the details, as you can read more about Haswell-E over at Anand’s or Tom’s. One thing that you do need to note is that you will need to buy an X99 motherboard and DDR4 ram if you want to use the Haswell-E platform.

Note: the contest period has ended. Thank you to everyone who entered! We’ll be announcing the winners soon.

We want to see the glorious PCs you’ve built, so we’re holding a contest and asking you to show us! Our favorite submissions will win prizes in the form of Amazon gift cards and be featured on this blog.

Are you looking for recommendations on a new keyboard? Perhaps it’s time to upgrade to one of the mechanical variety? You’ll find great recommendations at all price points and much more information in the guide to help you choose the right keyboard for you and your PC.

Thank you for following Logical Increments. We appreciate your trust in us to recommend the best PC hardware for anyone’s budget.

Recently, a buddy of mine told me that his 4-year-old PC was getting outdated and that he wanted to get a new rig. The big electronics retailer down the street had some good deals, he said.

I gritted my teeth. He kept going on about how it was too bad every computer today has Windows 8 on it and how it costs so much money and time to build your own. Thankfully, he said, the store down the street has a gaming computer on sale.

That’s when I thew up my hands and told him that, as his friend, I could not support him buying a “gaming computer” (or any other PC) from a retailer. He asked me what the big deal was. I told him: the big deal is, if you use your computer for more than just light Internet browsing, if you want to get the most for your money, and especially if you plan to use it for gaming, you really, really should build your own.

He asked me for one good reason why building was so much better than buying. I gave him five, and now I’m giving you a dozen. Here are 12 reasons why you should build your own PC instead of buying it pre-built:

This article was a team effort by the Logical Increments staff and Micah Dilse (@vidyajunkie)

An important and sometimes overlooked step to building your own PC is cable management. It may seem trivial, but good cable management can keep your computer running cooler and faster, and lengthen the time between cleanings. All the cables inside your case – especially ones with webbing – are major dust magnets. Any chassis, from the $30 entry-level boxes to the fortress disguised as the Corsair 900D, can give you cable management options. With good cable management, you get better airflow (keeping your components cooler), and minimize dust buildup (also keeping your components cooler).